Their interest as a business is not really to protect you from harm, but to avoid paying claims since this costs them money.
Their interest as non-publically funded entity is to avoid paying fradulent claims and to get rid of the people costing them money. There's a limit to how far they can screw with valid claims before getting sued for fraud or losing customers, so they're going to be more concerned about the first part. That's why they want the data.
I find use of this data to be tantamount to self-incrimination, a concept which is completely unconstitutional.
If you're arrested for vehicular homocide, and they find a blood stained dent in your bumper, with a valid search warrent, is that self-incrimination? How is it different - in both cases, your car is telling an tale you'd rather it not.
It's really hard to see the difference between/., religious extremists and conspiracy theorists. All 3 will make sure the "facts" line up with their beliefs, regardless of what is really happening.
Except for the minor fact that unlike most journalists, the corrections column runs on the front page, and slashdot is quite reliable about getting that corrections column up.
No one in their right mind would believe that the government would declassify documents that they feel could be damaging to themselves or the US public.
It's documented that the CIA tried to kill Castro with explosive cigars, that they tested LSD on unsuspecting subjects, that they withheld syphilis treatment for a group of black subjects for decades as part of a study. The government isn't monolithic, and has regular turnover on people, between politics and just plain old age. And between basic honesty, vengance on political opponents, and an active coverup being work (which is not why they took the job), stuff's going to come out. If the government shot JFK, no one would stand to benefit now from its coverup, and many people would actively try to unsupress it.
How many times in your life have you changed the world? The concept to stop chasing wildlife, and to settle down and grow crops is revolutionary, and would be a scary step (since you're betting on crops coming in right until you can build up enough storage) even for those who have plenty of knowledge in the subject. The combination of knowledge, wisdom and courage to take that step is not commonly found, and even when the step was take, the society might easily disappear if there were a short drought. I have a harder time imagining why someone would do this, then why they wouldn't.
This film was initially banned in Norway for blasphemy. It wasn't released there until 1980 - IMDB
Western countries also have their skeletons in the closet.
Your point? If Slashdot had been around in the 1970's, we would have been bitching about Norway's actions. This is not an east versus west thing; this is a Egypt is being stupid thing.
(And I'm not sure Egypt is really an Eastern country. Historically speaking, it interacted with the Greeks and the Roman empire extensively. Geographically, it's as far west as the Ukraine and St. Petersberg, both part of the west. It's also in Africa, not the Middle East.)
you guys kinda created this fiasco in the first place.
"You guys" are your customers. If you can't keep your customers happy, you go under. If your customers are unreasonable and you can't reach a point where they can be satisfied, there may not be a market. You can't say that it's the customer's fault if you can't sell your product - it's the business's fault for not understanding the market. RedHat chose to play it 100% open source; Caldera didn't. That was apparently a bad business choice, to which they have no one but themselves to blame.
I bet there are many people who buy at Walmart specifically to get clean versions,
How do you know that you won't have to specifically ASK for the edited versions?
I know at least one person who bought a CD there, only to find out they bleeped out all the bad words, especially the word "drug". It wasn't marked as edited in any way. He wasn't amused.
I wish MORE companies would stand up against the trash that gets marketed today.
If the consumers don't want it, they won't buy it. I don't want a bunch of millionares controlling what I watch based on their petty personal hangups.
There is nothing wrong with holding a standard of decency.
There's a big difference from you holding a standard of decency, and the only store selling movies and CD's in Alva, Oklahoma holding a standard of decency. One is a personal choice, the other one pushes that choice on everyone in a community. They have the right to do that, but that doesn't mean we have to approve or like it.
You pay for firefighters and garbagemen too. It has nothing to do with my pending monopoly.
In exchange for a service, and in the case of garbage men, the people who pay for the service is exactly those who use their service.
have been attacked by you for my troubles. I didn't cry like a schoolgirl about it, why are you?
You continue with the ad hominea attacks.
It is my IP.
You never answered the question about patents, either. You really think that Thomas Edison's corporation should be getting royaltes and setting prices on most of the stuff we use?
I can will my home, my land, my cars, why not my IP?
Because home, land, and cars are physical objects and IP is a contract with a government for a monopoly?
not being forced to give away freely something that is mine.
You aren't being forced. You chose to put in the public's eye, knowing that it will go into the public domain. Your choice to do so.
I want protection under the law.
I'm sure that SCO wants protection from Unix imitations, too. Fortunately, the law isn't dictated by your wants.
Is that simple and clear enough?
Yes, you want society to give you protection, yet you don't want to give anything back to society.
Just because I nailed you for inflammatory comments for grins doesn't make it ad hominem.
Judging by the tone of your multiple posts, I'd guess you're under 30, making under $30K a year with no family to support or a burn out who realizes his career is going down the tubes.
That has nothing to do with my arguments; it's a personal attack.
if you don't want to support my monopoly, don't buy my product
I still pay for the enforcers - the police and the courts.
Your opinion of what is good for society or what is right does not make it fact.
That's why this is a debate. You're supposed to explain why you disagree, not attack your opponent.
You're discounting my rights to my IP (and to profit exclusively from it) in the name of social interest,
Actually, more of this argument centers around your children's rights to your IP. You've never explained why it's right for us to funnel millions of dollars of taxpayer's money to people who never worked for it (via the means of schools and libraries), except as welfare for the poor children of artists.
That may have been true at one time, like, back in the day. These days there are less of us (programmers and admins) and more skidiots and wannabe's. There are more slashdolts out there than slashdotters, period.
Gee, this coming from someone who has managed to wrack up two "-1, Offtopic"s in the last 25 comments, and whose response to my claiming that this course was not good for society was ad hominem.
The obligation of those creating IP to you begins and ends at your ability to pay for it.
But you're willing to create an obligation on me to protect your monopoly.
My comments are real world, not based on some hippie peace-love bullshit.
That's the same thing they said to the people who said that we shouldn't be fighting in Vietnam, that we shouldn't force the blacks to ride at the back of the bus, that we shouldn't be dumping toxins directly into our water supply, that we should let women vote, that we should free the slaves. You're so wrapped up in "what's good for me" that you're more then willing to ignore "what's good for society" and "what's right".
Now it could be argued that in something as fast moving as software, something 50 years old is dead. But how old is Unix already, eh?
But BSD kills the value of old Unix code, except as a historical piece. Pretty much anything you could pick up from even a ten year limit on GPL code has a BSD version.
More importantly, modern versions of (say) twenty year code generally have massive changes; handling K&R C is vastly different from handling C99; handling DOS is vastly different from handling Windows; handing Unicode is vastly different from handling ASCII. Just the changes between what could done with 64k of memory and 4G of memory is a huge difference.
What happens if there is no significant differences between that old code and the new code? Then who cares if it goes into the public domain - it's been abandoned, and either there's nothing to add, or it desperately needs work.
I hate this notion that people who come up with IP rather than any other form of work are somehow more special than everyone else.
Spoken like a typical slashdolt whose greatest intellectual contribution is posting anonymous trolls on/.
You know what slashdotter's do? In large part, we're programmers, and tend to write a bunch of English prose in the process. (Look at how much digital ink gets spilled on Slashdot everyday.) Our jobs, our hobbies depend on producing what's known as IP. Maybe we do know something about the subject.
Of course they would exist and they'd be affordable.
Really? I don't know how accurate it is, but I read some rumors that someone had bought up the rights to the Chronicles of Narnia and were editing them to be less Christian. Then the original version would not exist on the market, despite demand. The same is true of Doctor Dolittle; there are no unexpuragated editions of some of the DD series, because their racial attitudes are considered offensive.
Furthermore, there are many books that were only returned to print by Dover, because they could afford to publish them without copyright. Most of them would be unavailable without that.
As for affordable, I'm sure if you have enough money, they will be affordable. But I took a class - "The Ancient World". Previous years had the Revised Edition(?) of the Bible on the reading list. But they could no longer justify $15 for the amount of reading they were going to do out of it. Copies of the translation of Plato, otho, were public domain and sold at $1.50, making them easily available for our class. It's entirely possible that there may only be a expensive edition of certain volumes, and that many others will only be available used, and will be very expensive and take a lot of time to find.
someone can snatch my work up, do a fantastic job of marketing on it and make a killing while I struggle to make ends meet.
What's your point? Rembrandt made the first whitening toothpaste, and then all the mainstream brands copied the idea, and did a fantastic job of marketing it, and sell many more then Rembrandt ever did. That's the way life goes in a capitalist system; it's not just the idea; it's how you market it and sell it. Twenty years is probably too short, but if you can't sell a book in decades, what right do you have to complain if someone else can?
Books will exist 50 years from now and if you really want to buy them, you will be able to find them.
The Counterpane Fairy is now available on the net because it's in the public domain. However, before that, the only people had heard of it were people who had read it as a child, and it was very expensive to get a hold of a copy. Yes, Stephen King will be easy to find, but shouldn't we be able to read stuff fifty years from now that wasn't a bestseller in its day?
In the off chance I do write the "Great American Novel", it's very unlikely that anyone will put two and two together
It's quite likely, in fact, provided you don't publish anonymously. There's a wealth of bibliographic information out there. Besides which, your publisher has a copy, which he will be itching to publish.
so I would very likely sit on the first novel if it were considered public domain
So, instead of publishing and worrying about competition - which you'll likely win, if you publish first as "the only authorized version" in the appropriate price ranges - you'll just sit on it? That sounds petty.
Pay up for every public domain thing I've ever bought? Ummmm...I have.
You may have paid the latest packager, but are you honestly going to tell me that you paid the heirs of the original creators?
Red Hat gets my money.
Did you send money to all the people who worked on the programs in Red Hat, or only the publishers?
because William Shakespeare's publishers need their cut
My point exactly, look who's getting paid. If they are making money, why not me or my heirs?
I don't mean the people who put work into putting Shakespears' plays into printed from; I mean the people who petitioned Queen Elizabeth for eternal copyright.
Well, the publishers certainly didn't work for it either, from a standpoint of creativity.
But they did work for it. There are typesetters who took the time to typeset it, people who run the presses, who sort the slushpile, who advertise it, material costs to pay and risks to be taken.
If you're talking about Shakespeare's original publishers, that's why we don't let copyright last forever. (And just looking at the current world, any extended copyright is going to end up in the hands of a megacorp soon or later.)
They certainly pay a price to have an artist parent/grandparent.
I'm so sorry. I mean, some people grow up with parents who beat them, and some people grow up with parents who have jobs which keep them away from home weekdays, or for weeks on end, and some people's parents died or are crippled, but it's clear of all those, the people with artist parents are the worst off.
libPNG+zlib+libMNG - ~1.4 MB of compressed unfinished stuff, age and speed low.
libMNG is a seperate question, and zlib has to be there for gzip compression anyway.
anyone still wondering why it's not built into IE when GIF and JPEG and TIFF work so great is just oblivious.
TIFF is built into IE? Last time I was testing it, (a couple years ago), IE wouldn't load TIFFs without a plugin. I don't see why that's changed; I've never seen an inline TIFF file, and haven't seen that many TIFFs on the web anyway.
"We are better then TIFF because we have less features"
I've had several problems with one TIFF reader not reading other TIFF writers's files, including readers using different versions of libtiff. A file format that has one compression type instead of an indefinite number, and a fixed format instead of an endlessly flexible one doesn't have that problem as often.
OTOH, you've got the tools that are supposed to allow you to have only 2n image converters, but the interchange formats for that (PPM, PBM, PNM, others?) seem to always have some shortcoming, and they always have to introduce yet another interchange format! PNG does it all in one neat little compressed format.
I take it you've never seriously used netpbm? It's not just a converter between formats. The point of these formats is that they're easy and quick to read and write. It takes enough time to smooth, invert, dim, and add the result to the original; I don't need to wait on the program to decompress it four times in there.
It works for what it does; there's absolutely no way that people are going to stop using pnm until that's not true.
Same way it always is? This opens up no new cans of worms; there's always been differences between unpublished and published works.
The difference is, if I understand it correctly, if it's available to a general public. If you leave a few copies of your book in hotel rooms, it's published (real life case). So, by analogy, if you left your CD in a public park, that would be publishing. Once it became generally available on the web, it's probably published.
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into writing a book, I have to ask where you get off telling me that there should be a hard cap on the limit of my copyright.
In exchange your limitless copyright, please pay up for every public domain think you've ever bought. Give an extra ten bucks for just about every Disney movie you own or have seen, because Lewis Caroll's descendents need their cut. Give an extra ten bucks for every play of Shakespeare you've read or seen, because William Shakespeare's publishers need their cut. Give an extra 20 bucks a year to pay for the schools, which now need to pay a lot more for English books. Give an extra 20 for the libraries to buy these books. And realize all this money is going to people who didn't work a cent in their life for it, just because you feel your grandchildren are entitled to it.
Out of curiosity, have you ever seen the libpng code and API? They do not really inspire confidence
I may be mistaken, but I believe that libpng is the only chunk of PNG-decoding code on my system. That should inspire enough confidence in and of itself.
Unless I spend a significant amount of time analysing the code I won't know - and I do that I might as well write it myself...
For one thing, you can look at who else uses it and how. The fact that netpbm, Gnome and Mozilla all use libpng for frequent operations says that it works well. Secondly, it's not hard to look at the webpage and tell if it's being maintained and if the person has a good programming "resume" or not. Thirdly, does it honestly take you so long to read through another library that you could write and debug your own version faster?
Re:There are no legitimate "privacy concerns"
on
Walmart to Push RFID
·
· Score: 1
No matter how many times it is pointed out that RFID tags have a very small range and nobody can drive by your house and scan everything you own, people continue to rant against RFID tags.
And the fact that an old RFID tag on something you were can be scanned when you walk past the RFID readers that would need to be installed for this system to work is nothing to you.
Just one more example of the rampant ignorance that is becoming more pervasive in our society.
Yes, people who know something about the issues discussing possible problems; that's what you have to worry about. Much better to be one of the people who just ignores everything that's going on and trusts the government and corporations blindly.
Slashdot Mirror
Their interest as a business is not really to protect you from harm, but to avoid paying claims since this costs them money.
Their interest as non-publically funded entity is to avoid paying fradulent claims and to get rid of the people costing them money. There's a limit to how far they can screw with valid claims before getting sued for fraud or losing customers, so they're going to be more concerned about the first part. That's why they want the data.
I find use of this data to be tantamount to self-incrimination, a concept which is completely unconstitutional.
If you're arrested for vehicular homocide, and they find a blood stained dent in your bumper, with a valid search warrent, is that self-incrimination? How is it different - in both cases, your car is telling an tale you'd rather it not.
It's really hard to see the difference between /., religious extremists and conspiracy theorists. All 3 will make sure the "facts" line up with their beliefs, regardless of what is really happening.
Except for the minor fact that unlike most journalists, the corrections column runs on the front page, and slashdot is quite reliable about getting that corrections column up.
No one in their right mind would believe that the government would declassify documents that they feel could be damaging to themselves or the US public.
It's documented that the CIA tried to kill Castro with explosive cigars, that they tested LSD on unsuspecting subjects, that they withheld syphilis treatment for a group of black subjects for decades as part of a study. The government isn't monolithic, and has regular turnover on people, between politics and just plain old age. And between basic honesty, vengance on political opponents, and an active coverup being work (which is not why they took the job), stuff's going to come out. If the government shot JFK, no one would stand to benefit now from its coverup, and many people would actively try to unsupress it.
Why does this just not quite add up to me.
How many times in your life have you changed the world? The concept to stop chasing wildlife, and to settle down and grow crops is revolutionary, and would be a scary step (since you're betting on crops coming in right until you can build up enough storage) even for those who have plenty of knowledge in the subject. The combination of knowledge, wisdom and courage to take that step is not commonly found, and even when the step was take, the society might easily disappear if there were a short drought. I have a harder time imagining why someone would do this, then why they wouldn't.
This film was initially banned in Norway for blasphemy. It wasn't released there until 1980 - IMDB
Western countries also have their skeletons in the closet.
Your point? If Slashdot had been around in the 1970's, we would have been bitching about Norway's actions. This is not an east versus west thing; this is a Egypt is being stupid thing.
(And I'm not sure Egypt is really an Eastern country. Historically speaking, it interacted with the Greeks and the Roman empire extensively. Geographically, it's as far west as the Ukraine and St. Petersberg, both part of the west. It's also in Africa, not the Middle East.)
you guys kinda created this fiasco in the first place.
"You guys" are your customers. If you can't keep your customers happy, you go under. If your customers are unreasonable and you can't reach a point where they can be satisfied, there may not be a market. You can't say that it's the customer's fault if you can't sell your product - it's the business's fault for not understanding the market. RedHat chose to play it 100% open source; Caldera didn't. That was apparently a bad business choice, to which they have no one but themselves to blame.
If UNIX trademark becomes generic, some Joe Blow can create any old OS and call it UNIX.
But that would be false advertising, if it's not a Unix in any way, just like creating an orange juice and calling it apple juice.
I bet there are many people who buy at Walmart specifically to get clean versions,
How do you know that you won't have to specifically ASK for the edited versions?
I know at least one person who bought a CD there, only to find out they bleeped out all the bad words, especially the word "drug". It wasn't marked as edited in any way. He wasn't amused.
I wish MORE companies would stand up against the trash that gets marketed today.
If the consumers don't want it, they won't buy it. I don't want a bunch of millionares controlling what I watch based on their petty personal hangups.
There is nothing wrong with holding a standard of decency.
There's a big difference from you holding a standard of decency, and the only store selling movies and CD's in Alva, Oklahoma holding a standard of decency. One is a personal choice, the other one pushes that choice on everyone in a community. They have the right to do that, but that doesn't mean we have to approve or like it.
You say - *I want something for nothing, in the name of the public interest*.
And you say - I want eternal protection on my copyright and I want the public to pay for it.
You pay for firefighters and garbagemen too. It has nothing to do with my pending monopoly.
In exchange for a service, and in the case of garbage men, the people who pay for the service is exactly those who use their service.
have been attacked by you for my troubles. I didn't cry like a schoolgirl about it, why are you?
You continue with the ad hominea attacks.
It is my IP.
You never answered the question about patents, either. You really think that Thomas Edison's corporation should be getting royaltes and setting prices on most of the stuff we use?
I can will my home, my land, my cars, why not my IP?
Because home, land, and cars are physical objects and IP is a contract with a government for a monopoly?
not being forced to give away freely something that is mine.
You aren't being forced. You chose to put in the public's eye, knowing that it will go into the public domain. Your choice to do so.
I want protection under the law.
I'm sure that SCO wants protection from Unix imitations, too. Fortunately, the law isn't dictated by your wants.
Is that simple and clear enough?
Yes, you want society to give you protection, yet you don't want to give anything back to society.
Just because I nailed you for inflammatory comments for grins doesn't make it ad hominem.
Judging by the tone of your multiple posts, I'd guess you're under 30, making under $30K a year with no family to support or a burn out who realizes his career is going down the tubes.
That has nothing to do with my arguments; it's a personal attack.
if you don't want to support my monopoly, don't buy my product
I still pay for the enforcers - the police and the courts.
Your opinion of what is good for society or what is right does not make it fact.
That's why this is a debate. You're supposed to explain why you disagree, not attack your opponent.
You're discounting my rights to my IP (and to profit exclusively from it) in the name of social interest,
Actually, more of this argument centers around your children's rights to your IP. You've never explained why it's right for us to funnel millions of dollars of taxpayer's money to people who never worked for it (via the means of schools and libraries), except as welfare for the poor children of artists.
That may have been true at one time, like, back in the day. These days there are less of us (programmers and admins) and more skidiots and wannabe's. There are more slashdolts out there than slashdotters, period.
Gee, this coming from someone who has managed to wrack up two "-1, Offtopic"s in the last 25 comments, and whose response to my claiming that this course was not good for society was ad hominem.
The obligation of those creating IP to you begins and ends at your ability to pay for it.
But you're willing to create an obligation on me to protect your monopoly.
My comments are real world, not based on some hippie peace-love bullshit.
That's the same thing they said to the people who said that we shouldn't be fighting in Vietnam, that we shouldn't force the blacks to ride at the back of the bus, that we shouldn't be dumping toxins directly into our water supply, that we should let women vote, that we should free the slaves. You're so wrapped up in "what's good for me" that you're more then willing to ignore "what's good for society" and "what's right".
Now it could be argued that in something as fast moving as software, something 50 years old is dead. But how old is Unix already, eh?
But BSD kills the value of old Unix code, except as a historical piece. Pretty much anything you could pick up from even a ten year limit on GPL code has a BSD version.
More importantly, modern versions of (say) twenty year code generally have massive changes; handling K&R C is vastly different from handling C99; handling DOS is vastly different from handling Windows; handing Unicode is vastly different from handling ASCII. Just the changes between what could done with 64k of memory and 4G of memory is a huge difference.
What happens if there is no significant differences between that old code and the new code? Then who cares if it goes into the public domain - it's been abandoned, and either there's nothing to add, or it desperately needs work.
I hate this notion that people who come up with IP rather than any other form of work are somehow more special than everyone else.
/.
Spoken like a typical slashdolt whose greatest intellectual contribution is posting anonymous trolls on
You know what slashdotter's do? In large part, we're programmers, and tend to write a bunch of English prose in the process. (Look at how much digital ink gets spilled on Slashdot everyday.) Our jobs, our hobbies depend on producing what's known as IP. Maybe we do know something about the subject.
Of course they would exist and they'd be affordable.
Really? I don't know how accurate it is, but I read some rumors that someone had bought up the rights to the Chronicles of Narnia and were editing them to be less Christian. Then the original version would not exist on the market, despite demand. The same is true of Doctor Dolittle; there are no unexpuragated editions of some of the DD series, because their racial attitudes are considered offensive.
Furthermore, there are many books that were only returned to print by Dover, because they could afford to publish them without copyright. Most of them would be unavailable without that.
As for affordable, I'm sure if you have enough money, they will be affordable. But I took a class - "The Ancient World". Previous years had the Revised Edition(?) of the Bible on the reading list. But they could no longer justify $15 for the amount of reading they were going to do out of it. Copies of the translation of Plato, otho, were public domain and sold at $1.50, making them easily available for our class. It's entirely possible that there may only be a expensive edition of certain volumes, and that many others will only be available used, and will be very expensive and take a lot of time to find.
someone can snatch my work up, do a fantastic job of marketing on it and make a killing while I struggle to make ends meet.
What's your point? Rembrandt made the first whitening toothpaste, and then all the mainstream brands copied the idea, and did a fantastic job of marketing it, and sell many more then Rembrandt ever did. That's the way life goes in a capitalist system; it's not just the idea; it's how you market it and sell it. Twenty years is probably too short, but if you can't sell a book in decades, what right do you have to complain if someone else can?
Books will exist 50 years from now and if you really want to buy them, you will be able to find them.
The Counterpane Fairy is now available on the net because it's in the public domain. However, before that, the only people had heard of it were people who had read it as a child, and it was very expensive to get a hold of a copy. Yes, Stephen King will be easy to find, but shouldn't we be able to read stuff fifty years from now that wasn't a bestseller in its day?
In the off chance I do write the "Great American Novel", it's very unlikely that anyone will put two and two together
It's quite likely, in fact, provided you don't publish anonymously. There's a wealth of bibliographic information out there. Besides which, your publisher has a copy, which he will be itching to publish.
so I would very likely sit on the first novel if it were considered public domain
So, instead of publishing and worrying about competition - which you'll likely win, if you publish first as "the only authorized version" in the appropriate price ranges - you'll just sit on it? That sounds petty.
Pay up for every public domain thing I've ever bought? Ummmm...I have.
You may have paid the latest packager, but are you honestly going to tell me that you paid the heirs of the original creators?
Red Hat gets my money.
Did you send money to all the people who worked on the programs in Red Hat, or only the publishers?
because William Shakespeare's publishers need their cut
My point exactly, look who's getting paid. If they are making money, why not me or my heirs?
I don't mean the people who put work into putting Shakespears' plays into printed from; I mean the people who petitioned Queen Elizabeth for eternal copyright.
Well, the publishers certainly didn't work for it either, from a standpoint of creativity.
But they did work for it. There are typesetters who took the time to typeset it, people who run the presses, who sort the slushpile, who advertise it, material costs to pay and risks to be taken.
If you're talking about Shakespeare's original publishers, that's why we don't let copyright last forever. (And just looking at the current world, any extended copyright is going to end up in the hands of a megacorp soon or later.)
They certainly pay a price to have an artist parent/grandparent.
I'm so sorry. I mean, some people grow up with parents who beat them, and some people grow up with parents who have jobs which keep them away from home weekdays, or for weeks on end, and some people's parents died or are crippled, but it's clear of all those, the people with artist parents are the worst off.
libPNG+zlib+libMNG - ~1.4 MB of compressed unfinished stuff, age and speed low.
libMNG is a seperate question, and zlib has to be there for gzip compression anyway.
anyone still wondering why it's not built into IE when GIF and JPEG and TIFF work so great is just oblivious.
TIFF is built into IE? Last time I was testing it, (a couple years ago), IE wouldn't load TIFFs without a plugin. I don't see why that's changed; I've never seen an inline TIFF file, and haven't seen that many TIFFs on the web anyway.
"We are better then TIFF because we have less features"
I've had several problems with one TIFF reader not reading other TIFF writers's files, including readers using different versions of libtiff. A file format that has one compression type instead of an indefinite number, and a fixed format instead of an endlessly flexible one doesn't have that problem as often.
Have you ever heard of BMF?
Nope. And considering that all I can find on the web is a DOS executable, I'd consider it pretty much worthless.
OTOH, you've got the tools that are supposed to allow you to have only 2n image converters, but the interchange formats for that (PPM, PBM, PNM, others?) seem to always have some shortcoming, and they always have to introduce yet another interchange format! PNG does it all in one neat little compressed format.
I take it you've never seriously used netpbm? It's not just a converter between formats. The point of these formats is that they're easy and quick to read and write. It takes enough time to smooth, invert, dim, and add the result to the original; I don't need to wait on the program to decompress it four times in there.
It works for what it does; there's absolutely no way that people are going to stop using pnm until that's not true.
JPG and GIF can do it 15K or BETTER!
If GIF can do it in 15K or less, so can PNG. I've never seen a PNG larger then the corresponding GIF.
How is it determined what has been "published"?
Same way it always is? This opens up no new cans of worms; there's always been differences between unpublished and published works.
The difference is, if I understand it correctly, if it's available to a general public. If you leave a few copies of your book in hotel rooms, it's published (real life case). So, by analogy, if you left your CD in a public park, that would be publishing. Once it became generally available on the web, it's probably published.
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into writing a book, I have to ask where you get off telling me that there should be a hard cap on the limit of my copyright.
In exchange your limitless copyright, please pay up for every public domain think you've ever bought. Give an extra ten bucks for just about every Disney movie you own or have seen, because Lewis Caroll's descendents need their cut. Give an extra ten bucks for every play of Shakespeare you've read or seen, because William Shakespeare's publishers need their cut. Give an extra 20 bucks a year to pay for the schools, which now need to pay a lot more for English books. Give an extra 20 for the libraries to buy these books. And realize all this money is going to people who didn't work a cent in their life for it, just because you feel your grandchildren are entitled to it.
Out of curiosity, have you ever seen the libpng code and API? They do not really inspire confidence
I may be mistaken, but I believe that libpng is the only chunk of PNG-decoding code on my system. That should inspire enough confidence in and of itself.
Unless I spend a significant amount of time analysing the code I won't know - and I do that I might as well write it myself...
For one thing, you can look at who else uses it and how. The fact that netpbm, Gnome and Mozilla all use libpng for frequent operations says that it works well. Secondly, it's not hard to look at the webpage and tell if it's being maintained and if the person has a good programming "resume" or not. Thirdly, does it honestly take you so long to read through another library that you could write and debug your own version faster?
No matter how many times it is pointed out that RFID tags have a very small range and nobody can drive by your house and scan everything you own, people continue to rant against RFID tags.
And the fact that an old RFID tag on something you were can be scanned when you walk past the RFID readers that would need to be installed for this system to work is nothing to you.
Just one more example of the rampant ignorance that is becoming more pervasive in our society.
Yes, people who know something about the issues discussing possible problems; that's what you have to worry about. Much better to be one of the people who just ignores everything that's going on and trusts the government and corporations blindly.